I’ve spent some time considering the plight of the working mother. This is a topic I often land on, having spent the best part of ten years juggling a corporate job and a family. But recently I have observed my sister in law enter the fray as she has returned to work after her maternity leave. I’ve been wondering: what are my words of wisdom to her? I have this overwhelming urge to warn and protect her from the tougher elements of being a working mother as if it is a battle zone that she is entering. Of course it isn’t. Many women can work and have children and it all goes swimmingly.

I wonder why for all the years that I have worked, after having children, I drove myself so hard, not content to let anything slip. To the extent that I became slightly unhinged. My hinges are back on now, but the fact remains: why can’t it be easier to have a job and a family?

In practical terms, I stood by my methods which over the years oiled the wheels, ensuring our life stayed on track. I religiously got our weekly food shopping on a Monday and planned what we would eat so there was always food in the house. Not having adequate or nutritious food was a surefire way to feel I was failing. Likewise, I ran a laundry system where I devised a cupboard dedicated to laundry sorting; a whites shelf, a coloured shelf, a darks shelf. All meaning that laundry was ready to be scooped and moved into the process, already colour coded. This made me feel in control. If no member of your family has clean clothes, you feel like you’re failing.

I’d plan weekend social engagements three to four months in advance, so at least my husband and I felt were seeing friends and living life. Being a social recluse makes you feel like you’re failing.

I’d fantasise about sorting my entire house so that every item had its own place. In my mind this was the key to not feeling like you’re failing.

And all the time, with these measures I would be in control and there would be no variables. But in reality, life does throw variables our way and so I would get sick or the kids would. Or there would be a school trip or an event that I had not catered for in my planning. Or I would simply forget who was meant to be where and when.

In short, it required military levels of organisation and discipline to make it work. Constantly thinking ahead. Not to mention normal life stuff like dentist visits and haircuts and school projects and weekends away. Family lunches and friends’ birthdays and thank you cards.

And now of course I can see that these rigorous demands, all self-imposed, were my undoing. For years, so staunchly did I defend this way of life. And now, when I observe it in myself I see that fundamentally, something had to give.

And so it has given. A shift of seismic proportions in my little life. And now I contemplate the future and wonder…where do I want to take it?

Thank you so much for all of your kind wishes for my daughter’s entrance exam. It went ‘OK’ – that was the main comment I could glean from her. Hard to gauge what exactly that means; I am not sure whether at 10 years of age, you can measure your success in the form of a verbal reasoning test where you scored 65% or above! I am so pleased it’s over and that we can, as a family, breath a collective sigh of relief.

I did come away from that school hall wondering – what’s it all about? Why is it that we feel compelled to propel our children headlong into the best of all opportunities. At the exam, the mother’s tongues were positively clacking with competitiveness as we waited for our off-spring to be released. Talk of private tutors and years worth of preparation to get in the ‘right’ school.

Admittedly we too have aimed high; this school is allegedly one of the country’s best and they like that ‘quirk’ factor in their intake. Pupils who are academic, sure, but who also will go on to be captains of industry and in their spare time climb Kilimanjaro for charity. I got a sense of disquiet as we left, and it remains with me, when I wonder why we want to subject Boo to the rigours of a competitive school. We were advised to try for this school and whilst there is a flush of pride at the prospect of her success, there is also the concern that at the young age of 10, she could also taste academic ‘failure’.

And those super-mothers that my friends and I encountered; I am not sure what to make of them. Two observations; there is always a degree to which we vicariously live through our children’s success. And secondly, for those lucky ones who also experienced the benefits of the best schooling the country had to offer in their youth, there is that sense of entitlement. As I had a pretty average childhood, with average state schooling, I think I am always slightly in awe of those mothers who take all that privilege for granted. It’s what they are used to. I do acknowledge that my life is privileged but somewhere, deep down, I justify that with the fact that my husband and I worked really hard for it and still do. It was never a given.

The other feature of my disquiet is the certain knowledge that whatever happens; whether it’s this school or another, come September she will be moving into a whole different sphere. One where I inhabit a much smaller place. Parental input will come in the form of once-a-term teacher/parent meetings and each day, instead of me kissing her goodbye in her classroom, she will be out on her own. Dropped at school by bus. Such a strange reality to face. It is simultaneously wildly exciting; my child out in the world! But also terrifying; my child out in the world!!

As ever with parenthood, it’s bittersweet. As each stage passes I look back on the previous one and consider how lovely it was back then. But despite any trepidation I have this frisson of pure excitement at what she is going to grow into. What she will become. can’t wait to see.

All that time he was working away, he really would have rather been at home more.

I would do pretty much anything to preserve my children’s happiness.

Getting a puppy was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Natalie Portman in Teen Vogue

I can feed our family of four, good square meals that don’t cost much, with enough careful planning and clever shopping.

My hair is really going grey and I really don’t like it.

The pangs I get when I miss my oldest and dearest friends are common to us all; life got busy and we got less time together. It’s a sad fact.

I do care what others think of me.

It’s OK that I spend a lot of time thinking about my outfits.

That time I first felt a wave of pain in my jaw, I so should have seen a Physiotherapist and not a dentist. Or a doctor. Or a consultant.

A strong marriage is one where you are not both competing to be the one working the hardest. It’s not a contest.

I have too heavy a reliance on earl grey tea.

There is only so much housework I can do; there is more to life than laundry.

I heart the 1980’s in the way my parents hearted the 1960’s.

Relinquishing control of my influence over my child’s future is exceptionally hard. (As in: I can’t sit the exam for her)

In most matters, what goes around comes around.

Good writing still has the capacity to take my breath away; just like it did when I was 13 and started studying literature.

It really was a mistake to get rid of that fur-collared, wool coat I had at University. Same goes for that perfect pleated skirt that formed my burgeoning ‘work wardrobe’. Not to mention that vintage red Mulberry clutch. Ditto those perfectly faded Levi 501s.

Things I have learned, now that I am currently not working. There is time…

I wake in the morning and normally I would, within seconds, be assessing whether it was a work day, who was going where, what I had in my schedule. Every decision would stem from that; how much time I had to do any given thing. I see now how time-obsessed I have been for so many years. Not unlike many, many women, I have worked since the day I finished University until now, punctuated only by two episodes of maternity leave, both lasting 8 months. Looking back, of course the time I was not working when I had my babies could hardly be described as ‘not working’. Those early months were amongst the hardest work ever!

The thing I notice the most is that my whole attitude to time dictated how I had to schedule every activity within an inch of its life. For example, laundry had to be done on certain days because if it wasn’t no one would have any clothes to wear. I couldn’t ever put it off as I knew that I would be working the next day. I religiously allocated slots of time to everything, constantly, and just that action over 10 years has, I can see now, been exhausting. I am exhausted with the scheduling and the logistics. Every invitation requires military decision-making on work commitments and their impact of school collection times. Every ‘nice thing’ could be slightly tarnished by the fact that I would have to move heaven and earth to make it happen. This particularly noticeable with the children, whose activities and needs I now find I can accommodate with minimal extra effort. It becomes a pleasure rather than a chore…

Yet – my mind is not still or passive with the relief of not working for a while. Not working is almost not natural to me. It’s all I have ever done and I find my mind wandering to what my colleagues are doing, who is doing my work, what projects are slipping, what decisions are faltering. Then of course I remind myself that life goes on in the corporate world and not for one second would I presume that they can’t live without me, be it temporarily or permanently.

This leads me as well to the working mother vs stay at home mother conundrum. I feel like I can now look at both sides. Much like childbirth, which I experienced on one occasion with all the drugs and on the other with none. I can honestly say neither was better or worse, the experiences were just different. I see now how attached I have been for so long to the working mother crusade, as if I single-handedly had to champion the fact that women can work and be good mothers. I find this fascinating now that I can see it more objectively.

All the advice I have had to slow down in recent weeks does ring true now and I see that I was going too fast; dare I say dangerously so. My body and the pain I have been feeling (read: trying to ignore for over a year) have been telling me; it’s time to stop. I spend my days now just trying to ‘be’ and when I write that, I really mean it this time. I have purported to just ‘be’ before on this blog, and I see that I was tricking myself in the belief that I was. Now – this time – is different.

I am left with the unnerving realisation that the pain is linked to the life I have been leading; in some way the stress and honestly, I had never thought of this, but the ergonomics of how I live have contributed to all of my muscles just seizing up. I try now to notice that my shoulders are hunched all of the time. I consciously have to drop them when I sit typing this or when I drive the kids to school. The tension is gradually seeping away but my goodness it’s a slow progress. I tell myself: it took years to get this way, it won’t stop in 4 weeks.

I don’t really know what tomorrow holds, let alone the future. It is completely alien to me to be in this sort of free-fall; decisions unmade, life choices unknown. But isn’t that the thing with well being? You can’t rush it…

By the way, I’ve written a follow-up to this post, five years later! Link here.

Quick fire: Here’s what I think:

Ageing gracefully?
I wish I was entirely fine with this process. It’s one of life’s inevitabilites. Fighting it, ultimately doesn’t work. There are elements of it that are life-affirming and wonderful; experience is beauty, but oh how I wish it just didn’t happen. That it wasn’t quite so brutal. My Mum, who is the ultimate role model for everything; she is AWESOME, has aged beautifully. She is at-one. I love and emulate that. And isn’t this image just beautiful?

Shopping as favourite?
For me, nothing like going into a shop and seeing lots of things that make my heart go pitter-patter. I wish I wasn’t quite so shallow and that the things that made me heart beat fast had more substance than a pretty dress. But that’s how I am – have been the same since the age of 5 (but then it was pink and white candy-striped dungarees that caught my eye).

Should mothers work?
Whatever gets you through the day. Such a fiercely personal choice. First one must look at why mothers work – what is it that motivates them? From my observations on this, it’s not all it seems; the motivations are wide, varied and unexpected. Understanding that choice must come first before any judgement is made about whether it’s right or wrong.

The medical profession?
I have always had the utmost faith in the medical profession. I respect doctors enormously, in a similar way to lawyers. Clever, dedicated people. However in recent dealings with the medical (dental) profession I have been left wanting. How come they don’t know all the answers? Have they not devoted years of study to finding out why something goes wrong with the human body? I am a specialist in my job – if someone asks me a question that I don’t know the answer to, I go away and find out. I don’t just send them away to cope with it. The older I get the more I find that there are few straight-forward answers in medicine. This bothers me.

Pushy parenting?
Should children be pushed academically and in, for example, sport? Should children be made to sit exams? I think, sometimes yes. Life has tests, why should we pretend in childhood that tests don’t exist? We can help reduce the number of tests (I am speaking metaphorically about all tests children face; be they mathematics, getting through playtime, being in a school production, running a race) but at the end of the day, is it not better to prepare children to know how to deal with some pressure? The trick is not too much pressure and to not erode or deface the relationship they have with their parents by making success synonymous with unconditional love and respect. I have seen pushy parents in action and it’s not pretty. Still working out how I feel about this one…

Cooking a meal from scratch every night?
Ready-made meals; what Jamie Oliver hates. I cook a fair amount, most nights I make a meal from fresh ingredients, from scratch. It is time-consuming and often I find it enormously tedious but I do it because it matters. I also periodically test my children on whether they know what a butternut squash looks like vs a chilli. I can’t bear the thought that some children don’t know what a potato is unless it comes in the form of chips. I think they have to see me cook; not just put a plastic packet in the oven.

images via are so happy

Going to bed at 8.30pm?
For adults, not children. I am all for it. For children, the earlier the better 😉

Having the right shoes?
Yep, it does matter. To me.

Making a good cheese sauce?
I find the most important thing is to whisk the roux with the milk, briskly; a brisk whisk if you will. I also find that I do it with a smile on my face as I think (always) of my friend L who commented that her bottom wobbled when making a cheese sauce. I find the smile helps the consistency 😉

On home days I immerse myself with the children, the school run, the farmhouse, nutritious after-school snacks, re-grouping, cooking, admin, making piles of ironed laundry (will I ever get to the bottom of the ironing basket?!). My mind empties of the deadlines and strategy and corporate manoeuvring of my work days. What I find bizarre is that in each ‘life’ I am comfortable. I miss neither one when I do the other. Very rarely do I do any work on home days, other than tracking the state of my inbox. At work, I will sometimes be in a meeting and catch myself, with a shock; the realisation that I haven’t eventhought about my own children for an hour or two.

I am lucky to have this delineation and the chance to do both. I figure that opportunity is a rare one; maybe I have found and maintained, at least on paper, that pinnacle of the work/life balance. But in reality it can be…confusing. On home days I think and feel so little about work that I wonder why I persist in the double life. Yes, it’s a means to an end but there are other consequences which every now and then I am fiercely reminded of. The project that I worked on earlier this year was a case in point, when nothing about life was balanced as I struggled with the professional challenges of an all-encompassing work effort can bring. For sure, home life suffered and the ‘wounds’ from that are only now making themselves known – you know how sometimes it takes six months for an effect to show in a child’s behaviour?

So I keep on – amongst some criticism that I take on too much and the knowledge that my kids may look back on these years and recall me being rather frazzled at times, rushing from work to collect them after school; one of the only Mums at the school gates in heels and a suit, blackberry in hand.

As I have said before and many commenters have reassured me there is no right answer. I notice though that now my children are older my contemporaries are talking about going back to work, just as the children are more self-sufficient at school. To me, having worked throughout following maternity leave, I would say my children still need me now, perhaps even more. In a way, if I didn’t work, that would be of more use to them now than when they were toddlers. The fact is they are so much more aware now…and that awareness I feel when they comment that I spend too much time in front of my laptop or when they know they have to fall quiet in the car if ‘Mummy’s boss’ calls.

Today is a home day, so I am going to zhush…potter…enjoy the view and be there after school full of smiles, in flat shoes, off to look for conkers for the school conker competition..

I had this strange sensation when I was away that I wanted to write, but had promised myself I wouldn’t as it was designed to be time away from everything normal. I noticed it has become ‘normal‘ to write now, which is notable, all things considered. In some ways I spent my time away thinking, but then in other ways I realised I made a concerted effort to think of nothing whatsoever.

I said there were some things afoot in our family. When we were away my husband got a job offer; the kind that has life-changing implications for us, so we spent days considering, pondering, reasoning, punctuated by swims in the pool and beach visits. I find sand between your toes helps in any decision-making process…

the view from the end of my sun lounger…

Meanwhile on other matters:

Every second morning I ran. Early, first thing, before the heat really took hold, I got up and went running, on a deserted farm track that hugged the golf course near where we stayed. Noticing olive, fig and citrus trees as I ran. Sometimes accompanied by stray Portuguese dogs (that made me run that little bit faster; fight or flight? Flight for me, all the way). So my husband and I ran alternate days; initially I beat his time running the same track, eventually he beat my time. I figured unfair: he has shorter legs! On those mornings when I returned and then swam in the pool, before everyone was up, I had moments of happiness that simply must be down to those exercise endorphins. I am not evangelical about many things but I have to say; running is the answer. It just makes you feel so good after. Not often during; but after.

The Boos were great fun. They excelled at late, balmy nights, ‘midnight’ swims, beach volley-ball at dusk, eclectic dinner menus (Piri-piri anyone?) and were altogether fantastic company. I realised, again and afresh, that babies grow into children who become the best people to chill with in my world. So many shared looks between their Daddy and I as we thought to ourselves ‘we made these cool people!’

Tropical warm climates are happy-making. No question. To wake to sunshine every day is a gift and I wonder now, as I come home to torrential rain and cloud – why do we live here? England is beautiful but really, would it hurt to be sunny just a little bit more often?

We lived like sloths. Well more importantly, I did. No cleaning, no laundry, no having to be anywhere at any time and I wondered – how can I hold on to this feeling of freedom? Normally, I am a slave to housework. My ‘part time’ job takes up too much of my time. The tyranny of the school run effects every day of life in term-time. What to do? How to maintain the holiday vibe? Suggestions on a postcard please…

I marvelled daily on how my girl, in particular, is growing up. Is that a nine year old thing? This child, who this summer learned to do backwards dives, can use her body in a way that I can only faintly recall when I was that age. She is just so clever and beautiful. A marvel indeed to me.

Is it wrong that I was back home for no more than a few hours before I started scanning the web for the next holiday? Live for holidays or live for life? Hmmm….

Back to the decision-making process; we mused the life-changes, we looked at every angle, and we decided yep let’s go for it. That was in the summer sun of Portugal.

Now we are home, events are actually unfolding in ways that we didn’t anticipate, so I am not sure whether it’s a stay or go situation afterall as the present employer has a card to play…will keep you posted.

I have a friend; one of the mothers at school, who I have closely observed in recent months. She got a new job in her chosen profession, an absolute gift of a role that she would have only dreamed of when she was qualifying. The catch was that it was full-time and there was travel involved. She had made an agreement with her new company that she would have ‘every other Friday off’ in order to give her some time; a pseudo part-time arrangement. So she took the job and the school mothers stood by and watched as her two children started going to early morning club and after school club and were pretty much at school all the time. A couple of school events passed; a mother’s tea party where she did not attend and instead a teacher ‘stood in’ as Mummy to her five year old son.

I pass no judgement here; I am a working mother and I think working is great, if you can make it work for you. Over the time that passed, it was abundantly clear that the ‘Fridays off’ were not materialising for my friend. Yet when I asked her she said she loved the job and that it was what she had always been working towards. And I thought great – isn’t that, after all, why us women got educated and trained? Exactly so that there was this choice to work andhave it all? I sense here I am stepping around some fairly contentious feminist issues, so I will try to tread carefully.

Anyway, I asked her again recently how it was going. She said she was exhausted, that having a cleaner and an ironing lady actually made little difference and what she really needed was some sort of house-keeper/home-maker. Basically someone who was another version of her. Who could help with homework and clear the dishes and do the laundry. So that she didn’t have to do a full and demanding day at work and then return home with her children to see the breakfast bowls, complete with congealed milk still on the kitchen table.

You see therein lies the rub. For all that we might want to work and be wildly effective in our working lives, the sacrifice persists. There is no having it all. She is worn out. Her kids are in care a lot of the day. She and they are missing out somewhere along the way, surely (I am sure too that they gain things as well, but still). Yet she is also having the chance to do a great job, is realising her potential professionally.

It’s all about choice and as many more lucid women have said before me, there is no ideal; no easy option. Full time motherhood is hard, has it’s challenges in the exactly the same way as working motherhood. If there were just a way to clone oneself so that there was a work version and a home version, simultaneously performing, maybe that would be the answer? Thought provoking stuff indeed…

Some gentle Tuesday musings on life – from me. With love and wondering…
Why is it that being out in the beach air makes you sleep so well?

Why is it that some mothers are so competitive about their children’s abilities and some just aren’t?

Why is it that my house fill ups with paper each and every day? Do I need to stop my postman from delivering?

Why is it that I have all the best intentions of doing my ironing/sorting that cupboard/cooking a batch of lasagne at mid-day and then by 8pm I have lost all impetus?

Why is it that my lipstick never ever stays on? Am I doing it wrong?

Why is that so few women actually acknowledge and deal with their visible panty line? Do they think that if they can’t see their behinds that their behinds don’t exist?

Why is that every time I tell my son it’s bedtime he retorts ‘NO!’? It’s not as if bedtime is a new thing – bedtime comes every night as sure as the sun setting. Why does he persist in questioning the routine of the cosmos?

Why is it that my ‘to do’ list is never done?

Why is it that my daughter has suddenly become extremely bothered by what she is wearing and how her hair is put up? Not to mention the Justin Bieber fixation…

Why it is that the school summer holidays fill me with joy and worry at the same time?

Why is it that I never, despite evidence to the contrary in my wardrobe, have enough pretty dresses? Did my Mother do something wrong when I was a child? Am I dress-addicted?

Why is it that my work days creep up imperceptibly and so very quickly, whereas weekends take an age to arrive?

Why is it that food tastes so much better when my husband has cooked it? Am I that bad a cook?